Monday, January 18, 2016

Concordance to Vergil's Aeneid

This is a minimal concordance without any morphological analysis,
providing each form of each word in the context of its line. The text is
taken from that at the Latin Library site, which is in the public
domain; it has been modified to normalize orthography in a few places. I
prepared it because a fairly cursory search online showed nothing like
it that was complete, and I wanted to have this information available
for my own research. If it duplicates someone else’s efforts, I
apologize.The concordance was generated by mechanical means (who would do it by hand nowadays?) using a sequence of grep
functions with Bare Bones’ BBEdit program. There are a few
peculiarities in consequence. There may be an occasional bit that got by
indexed oddly, due (almost certainly) to deficiencies in my own regular
expression formation, though I tried to eliminate them by scrutinizing
the resultant files by hand.

Perhaps more interestingly, I’m not sure what the conventions are for
words repeated in a given line, but this concordance will give each a
separate entry. Accordingly you may find two identical lines in a row,
e.g.:

This is not an error, but the first one is documenting the first ne
in the line, and the second documenting the second. I find it useful
for the kind of work I'm doing; if you don’t, it should not prove
difficult to ignore.

Finally, some will surely find the size of the text rather small.
This is because (for my purposes, at least) a critical function of such a
concordance view is to provide a synoptic view of a lot of material
rather than to set it out extensively for easy reading. Those who find
it just too small, however, can enlarge the view by the conventional
means (Command-+ on a Mac or Control-+ on a Windows machine). I have
tried it with various magnifications and found that it seems to work
reasonably well.I am willing to share the code that created this, trivial though it
is (only about four grep calls, applied iteratively, and a sort); I am
also willing to entertain suggestions for emendations or revisions,
provided they are presented civilly — feel free to write to me at
[mcmenomy] [at] [dorthonion] [dot] [com].

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.